


dust and devils on my conscience

by cinderfell



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, its percy lmao of course its Angsty(TM), post-episode 50
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-26
Updated: 2016-04-26
Packaged: 2018-06-04 16:33:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6666082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cinderfell/pseuds/cinderfell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Percy deals with the aftermath of recent events that are almost certainly his fault. Vex tries to be a voice of reason.</p>
            </blockquote>





	dust and devils on my conscience

**Author's Note:**

> i've never written cr fic before so this is me feeling out the characters and how to write them. episode 50 fucked me up. perc'ahlia fucked me up.

He wiped the sweat beginning to drip down his forehead from the heat of the open flame with his arm, eyes still trained down at the half-concocted creation that seemed to be fighting him at every turn. He had been sitting at the bench just staring at it and turning it over and over looking for a way to make it work for hours.

A soft giggle drew his attention. He turned to look at the woman who had taken up residence in his makeshift workshop in Scanlan’s mansion seemingly every time they used it. 

“What are you laughing at?” He asked, brow raising as he watched her set the book she had been reading quietly down on the table near her. 

Still giggling to herself, she pointed at her own forehead. “You just smeared soot across your forehead.” 

He reached up and touched his head. Sure enough, his fingers came back black. 

“Let me get that for you.” She stepped forward, producing a handkerchief from her pocket. A wave of embarrassment washed over him as she leaned down next to him. 

“I’m not a child,” he protested. He didn’t pull away from her hands, however, allowing her to move closer to him. 

“You’ve been sleeping about as good as one recently.” She cupped his chin with one hand, holding him in place as she dabbed at his forehead with the scrap of cloth. He scrunched his nose up at the touch of it, instinctively trying to angle himself away from her. She held firm, squeezing down on his jaw as she scrubbed at the mark. 

“I’ve had a lot to think about recently.” 

“We all have,” she amended, tucking the cloth back in her pocket. “That doesn’t mean we have to push ourselves to the brink of exhaustion because of those thoughts.” 

“Where is this coming from?” He eyed her nervously, pressing his hands together so she wouldn’t notice him fidgeting. Serious talks with Vex’ahlia were rarely fun. The upside was that he usually didn’t get punched in the face. 

“I’m worried about you, Percy.” Vex crossed her arms as she looked him over from where he sat on the bench. “You barely touch your food, you don’t sleep, and you’re pulling away from your family.” 

She wasn’t wrong, exactly. He definitely hadn’t been sleeping and he rarely talked to anybody except for Vex and Keyleth anymore. Vax was still furious with him (rightfully so) and he couldn’t look Grog or Pike in the eyes without feeling intense guilt. He didn’t feel any guilt towards Scanlan but frankly they just weren’t very close friends. 

“Vex,” he sighed, shifting back so he could look up at her. “With all due respect, it appears that I’ve caused many of my friends to be hurt in recent months because I was selfish or didn’t think things through all the way.” 

“Not to take the whole brooding thing away from you,” she cut in. “But I’m pretty sure our stroke of bad luck in recent months has been a group effort.” 

He pulled his glasses off, dropping them onto the bench and pinching the brim of his nose. “Not even touching some of the horrors I unfortunately inflicted on all of you in Whitestone—” He held up a hand, stopping her from protesting the obvious. They needed to save the city. They needed to reaffirm themselves as good, or at the very least well-intentioned, people in the eyes of the council. They needed to help him find closure. Percy knew these things. It still didn’t help alleviate him of the intense guilt he felt for letting the things that happened to the party in Whitestone happen. “—I’m also directly responsible for giving Grog that damn sword. Which means that I’m to blame for everything that happened because of it.” 

“You couldn’t have known what would happen.” She crossed her arms, looking down at him. Even as she spoke, there was a glimmer of something in her eyes. It was the tiniest bit of doubt in her own words, doubt in him. Somehow that hurt more than when her brother punched in the face. Still, he was glad that she was unsure. He didn’t want her to just blindly believe in him. He wanted to be worthy of her trust and admiration. 

“No, I never thought it would go this far,” he reluctantly agreed. Percy was a smart man. There was no denying that. Even he couldn’t have foreseen the lengths to which Craven Edge would go to fill itself. “But I should’ve known better than to give something like that to somebody like Grog. I knew something was off about the sword but I did it on impulse.” 

Pause. 

“I’ve been doing a lot of things on impulse recently.” 

“Maybe it's because you’re sleep deprived and it's been negatively affecting your decision-making skills.” Her voice was dry but there was genuine worry in her eyes as she seemed to examine his face. He hadn’t intentionally looked in a mirror in a couple of days but based on the distorted glimpses of himself he had caught in reflective surfaces he knew that she was finding dark circles beneath his eyes and a scruffy, unshaven face at the very least. That wasn’t even factoring in all the grime from tinkering all night. 

He let out a long breath, shaking his head. “It doesn’t matter. I still caused this regardless of the state I was in. If I never gave Grog that sword then he wouldn’t have died and maybe Pike wouldn’t have had another close call.” 

“He could’ve thrown any weapon and hit her.” Vex cocked her head to one side and she spoke. 

“True, but he didn’t throw any weapon. He threw the giant evil sword that I gave him.” He dropped his head into hands, rubbing absently at his eyes until he felt like he was seeing stars. She was quiet. After a moment he raised his head up to look at her. “Vex, I am responsible for two of my friends’ deaths. We have been very lucky in that we’ve found methods to bring you and Grog back but it doesn’t change the simple fact that if it wasn’t for my own impulsiveness you two never would’ve had to live through that. Or, you know, die through it. Whatever.” 

“Percival,” she said softly, taking another step closer to him and crouching lower so they were at eye-level. He glanced away from her as she drew nearer, reaching up to rub the back of his neck nervously. There was a slight tremor in his hands that she had never really noticed before, or at the very least never commented on, but her eyes seemed to register the shake as they trailed over the gunslinger. His hands were steady when he tinkered, steady when he aimed a gun. Take those away and he seemed at a loss as to what to do with them. She reached out, placing one hand on his shoulder and brushing off some ash that had settled on his shirt with the other. He stiffened at her touch. “I don’t… blame you for my death.” 

“ _I_ blame myself for your death.” There was a slight tremble at the tail end of his sentence. He felt as if the guilt in his body had moved up into his throat, sitting in it like a cold rock. He cleared his throat to try and push it back down. Percy was undoubtedly a mess but he wasn’t overly fond of the idea of crying in front of her. 

“Fine.” The hand that had been brushing ash from his shirt moved to cup his face, fingers warm against his jaw. He flinched at the touch of skin against skin. He wasn’t a very squeamish man but there was just something about the ranger that made him want to turn around and run. She shifted so her knees were on the bench next to him. “But I’m still here.” 

And she was. 

She pressed a kiss to his cheek, catching him by surprise. She was gentle, one hand smoothing down his shirt as her thumb brushed a small circle across the whiskers on his jaw. She lingered. Her breath was warm against his cheek, warmer than the fire blazing in the forge not even five feet away. He was still, scared to move. Scared to breath. He waited for her to pull away but she remained close to him, her fingers still digging into his shoulder. It was then that Percy had an overwhelmingly stupid idea. 

He wanted to kiss her. 

_Really_ kiss her. 

He hesitated. There was nothing overly romantic about their current situation. Sure, the room was lit only by the warm glow of the fire and she was impossibly close. It didn’t change the fact that he was sweating and covered in ash and grease and he had literally just spilled his guts to her about his fears and regrets. But Vex was there, pressed up against his side with her lips still against his cheek. There was no pressure from her anymore, just the soft feeling of her lips against his skin. He turned his head towards her slowly, dazed as he felt her lips brush across his face. She was perfectly still, seemingly willing to let whatever was about to happen between them happen. 

And he stopped. 

She seemed to notice it. She tilted her head back so he could see her face better, her eyebrows scrunched together. He was… very aware of how close her mouth still was to his. 

It wasn’t as if they had never kissed before. When he made her a particularly good batch of arrows she had grabbed his face with both hands and pulled him in for a kiss. It felt like years had passed since that kiss. Even then he could tell it wasn’t serious. Then there were the kisses on the cheek. He had brushed off the first one—it was in Vex’s nature to be slightly flirtatious when showing affection, even when it came to friends—but it just kept happening. He was torn between the thought that perhaps those brief kisses meant something more and the thought that his sleep-deprived brain was reading too much into it. 

Percy had never kissed her. The ones before, cheek kisses included, had always been Vex reaching out to kiss him. Truth be told, he had only considered kissing her once. It had been a fleeting thought after he gave her the siege arrow. He had shoved the thought back down when she asked about his black eye. Vax had certainly made sure to leave him with something to think about. 

There was just something off about the idea of kissing her—kissing her for real—in his current state. There was so much he was still struggling with when it came to who he was. It felt wrong to initiate anything when he wasn’t sure he could really commit to anything with her when he could barely even pull himself together long enough to actually think things through for more than thirty seconds. He owed her more than a couple messy kisses in a workshop, that was sure. 

“I think I need to learn to stop being so impulsive.” His voice was hoarse. He knew she could hear it. 

“Well,” she murmured, leaning away from him. Despite the fire, he felt a chill creep through his shoulder as her hand left it. She still sat close to him but with all of her touch pulled from him it felt as if a chasm had opened between them. She looked almost disappointed. “You could stand to be a _little_ impulsive.” 

“Maybe,” he agreed. “But not right now.” 

She sighed, closing her eyes. As she opened them again, she seemed to shrug off whatever weight had fallen over them. “Alright.” 

He opened his mouth. He wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted to say. He wanted to make sure that she was okay. That they were okay. He had grown very fond of her company in recent months and it would be a shame to lose that. He already felt a difference in his relationships with the others, the last thing he needed was for Vex to be included in that. 

Whatever his brain was going to churn out was stopped before it ever left his mouth as she suddenly reached out and ruffled his hair. He flinched at her initial touch, surprised by the affectionate gesture so soon after such a strange encounter. A soft smile spread across her face as she saw his surprise. “None of us are perfect, Percy. Good people can make mistakes. Remember that.” 

“I—” Not bothering to hear his response, she got to her feet and brushed herself off. He closed his mouth, watching as she picked her book up from the table in the corner and tucked it under one arm. She paused halfway out the door of the workshop. 

“Get some sleep, Percival.” Her voice was gentle. “If you don’t want to do it for yourself then do it for the people who worry about you. You’re a lot more fun when you aren’t delirious because you’ve been awake for three days.” 

His voice cracked as he barely managed to respond with, “I’ll try.” 

“That’s all I ask.” And then she was gone, quietly shutting the door behind her. 

He was alone again. The workshop was quiet except for the cracking of fire behind him and the sound of his own heart pounding away inside of him. 

He picked up his tools and the half-constructed device that refused to come into fruition, tucking them under his arm. Most of the sleep he’d managed to sneak in since Vex’s death had crept up on him in the workshop. He would wake up an hour or two later with grime caked onto his face, face-first in whatever he fell asleep making. Perhaps it was finally time to use that bedroom Scanlan had made for him. 

When he finally fell asleep, tucked under the surprisingly comfortable blankets of the conjured bed, he dreamed of arrows.


End file.
